Observations such as these raise numerous questions - certainly more than they answer. The situation is very much the same for hypnotised people, when given a traditional suggestion such as “Your arm is getting lighter and is going to float up.” Typically, the person will announce that “The arm is moving by itself.” The data gleaned are consistent with the belief that, while schizophrenic experiences are clearly self-generated, the sufferer remains ignorant of their source so ascribes them to an external agency. Nevertheless, recently information about neural activity during hallucinations has been emerging. One problem is the difficulty of arranging a hallucination ‘to order’, hence the use of a hypnosis analogue by Szechtman et al. Recently, however, evidence gathered from brain-scanning suggests that hypnotised people really do ‘see’ things that are not there, and that the pattern of neural activity bears more resemblance to actual seeing than to imagining.Įven with the advent of scanning, it has not been easy to work with schizophrenic patients. Until recently the perceptual distortions achieved by people who are highly susceptible to hypnosis had to be taken ‘on trust’ sceptics were inclined to the view that, at best, they were no different from imagining. It turns out that people who score high on a measure of schizotypy also tend to score high on measures of hypnotic responsiveness. Regarding hypnosis, not everyone is equally responsive: the range of susceptibilities in the general population is normally distributed (the same bell-shaped curve that appears with intelligence for example). Many people will claim experiences such as occasionally feeling that there is something different about themselves when looking in a mirror, or thinking they heard someone speak when they were alone. Schizotypy is a measure of a healthy person’s tendency to experience some of the effects that would be commonplace for a schizophrenic patient. A hint that similar underlying processes may be involved in the two conditions is to be found in the Schizotypy/Susceptibility correlation.
Indeed, Szechtman et al (1998) considered them sufficiently similar to justify employing hypnotic auditory hallucinations as a research analogue for the ‘hearing voices’ of schizophrenia. There are intriguing parallels between the hallucinations experienced in conditions such as Schizophrenia and those that can be induced in hypnosis. Peter Naish "Hypnotic and Psychotic Hallucinations: The Temporal Connection"
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